Why choosing how you view someone in your head is a moral act
In 1970, philosopher Iris Murdoch introduced a mother-in-law, M, who secretly considers her daughter-in-law, D, vulgar and unrefined, though she treats her politely. Over time, without any change in D, M deliberately re-examines D with loving, just attention, coming to see her as delightfully spontaneous. M's external actions never alter. Murdoch showed that morality is not just about outward behavior; choosing how you inwardly perceive others is itself an active, vital moral achievement.
The Mother-in-Law and the Hidden Shift
In her 1970 collection of essays, The Sovereignty of Good, philosopher Iris Murdoch introduced an example that challenged the core of modern moral philosophy. The scenario concerns a mother-in-law, referred to simply as M, and her daughter-in-law, D. M initially feels a quiet disdain for D. In M's eyes, D is vulgar, noisy, tactless, and unrefined, an unsuitable match for her son. Yet M never lets these feelings show. Bound by good manners and a commitment to family harmony, M behaves with impeccable politeness, never uttering an unkind word or making a hostile gesture.
Over time, however, M experiences a change of heart. Wondering whether her harsh judgment is clouded by prejudice, snobbery, or jealousy, M deliberately decides to re-evaluate D. She resolves to look again, striving to view D with justice and love rather than through the lens of her own wounded pride. Without D altering her behavior in the slightest—and even if D were absent or deceased—M's vision transforms. What once appeared vulgar now reveals itself as delightfully spontaneous, and what seemed noisy is understood as youthful exuberance. Externally, M's courteous behavior remains unchanged. Yet Murdoch insisted that something undeniably moral had occurred entirely within M's mind.
The Mid-Century Focus on Outward Action
When Murdoch presented this thought experiment, mainstream moral philosophy was dominated by frameworks that treated inner thoughts as secondary, or even irrelevant, to ethics. In the mid-twentieth century, analytical moral philosophy, particularly at Oxford, was deeply influenced by behaviorism and linguistic analysis. Thinkers such as R. M. Hare framed morality in terms of overt choices, actions, and public language. Under this prescriptivist and behaviorist view, an individual's moral character was measured almost exclusively by their observable deeds and public commitments.
At the same time, continental existentialism, championed by Jean-Paul Sartre, placed supreme emphasis on will, choice, and decisive action in an indifferent world. Both traditions, despite their differences, shared an underlying assumption: morality happens at the moment of public decision. In that picture of the world, what goes on in private consciousness is mere psychology, invisible and morally neutral until it translates into a concrete, outward choice. Murdoch argued that this picture offered an impoverished, mechanistic model of human life, one that ignored the ongoing inner labor that makes outward decisions meaningful in the first place.
Attention and the Influence of Simone Weil
To explain what was happening inside M, Murdoch turned to a concept she adopted from the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil: attention. Murdoch defined attention as a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality. Unlike will, which is often conceived as an aggressive, muscular exertion of effort directed toward doing something, attention is an exercise in receptive, patient looking. It requires quiet contemplation and an intentional suspension of one's own immediate self-interest.
Through attention, perception itself becomes an active, continuous moral achievement. Murdoch maintained that human beings do not look out at an objective, neutral landscape of facts and then neutrally apply moral values to decide how to act. Instead, the very way we perceive the world is already saturated with moral significance. Prejudices, fears, and personal vanity constantly distort how we see other people. Learning to see another person accurately—free from our own self-protective distortions—demands rigorous moral discipline.
The Selfish Ego and the Discipline of Unselfing
Murdoch's moral philosophy was deeply informed by a realistic, somewhat pessimistic view of human psychology, drawing significantly on Sigmund Freud. She accepted Freud's insight that the human ego is an obsessive, anxious mechanism constantly generating comforting fantasies to protect its own vanity. Left to its own devices, the mind naturally reduces other people to caricatures, rivals, or instruments for its own gratification. Self-deception is not an occasional slip; it is the default posture of human consciousness.
Because the ego is constantly weaving self-serving illusions, moral progress requires what Murdoch termed unselfing. Unselfing is the act of piercing through personal vanity to perceive external reality as it genuinely is. In the case of M and D, M's original view of her daughter-in-law was not an objective reading of the facts; it was a projection of M's social snobbery and maternal jealousy. M had to actively dismantle her own egoistic resentment to see D as a distinct, real human being possessing her own independent life and merits.
Platonism and the Reality of the Good
Murdoch grounded this account of attention in a secular defense of Platonism. In Plato's Republic, the Form of the Good is compared to the sun, an illuminating source that makes reality visible and intelligible, even if the Good itself can never be fully grasped or defined. Murdoch resurrected this idea, proposing that the Good operates as a transcendent, magnetic standard that draws human beings toward reality. Moral growth is not about inventing one's own values through arbitrary acts of will, as existentialists suggested, but about discovering an external truth that exists independently of oneself.
Murdoch also highlighted the role of great art and the natural world as everyday training grounds for this moral vision. When a person contemplates a great painting, listens to music, or observes a kestrel hovering in the sky, their anxious, self-absorbed thoughts temporarily vanish. The mind submits to the reality of something outside itself that cannot be controlled or possessed. Murdoch argued that this same humble attentiveness must be brought into human relationships, where recognizing the distinct reality of another person is both harder and more consequential.
Why Inner Vision Governs External Choice
By redefining morality around perception rather than isolated acts of will, Murdoch fundamentally altered how ethical decision-making is understood. In the conventional view, a moral agent stands at a crossroads, considers a set of neutral facts, and executes a choice. Murdoch argued that by the time an individual arrives at the moment of visible choice, the moral work has already largely been done. What an individual chooses to do flows directly and naturally from how they have already framed and perceived the situation.
If a person sees another through a haze of contempt and rivalry, their range of possible actions will already be severely impoverished. Conversely, if one has cultivated the habit of just and loving attention, the right course of action is often immediately obvious, requiring no agonizing crisis of the will. Morality, for Murdoch, is not an episodic series of public decisions. It is an unbroken, quiet effort of consciousness—a continuous striving to look at the world, and the people within it, with honesty, clarity, and love.
Key takeaways
•Iris Murdoch demonstrated through the example of M and D that changing how one inwardly perceives another person is a vital moral achievement, even if external behavior never changes.
•Murdoch challenged mid-century moral philosophy, which prioritized overt actions and existential will, by arguing that perception itself is deeply ethical and shaped by ongoing mental effort.
•Drawing on Simone Weil and Sigmund Freud, Murdoch defined attention as a just, loving gaze that overcomes the ego's natural tendency toward self-serving fantasy and prejudice.
•In Murdoch's framework, moral choices are determined by how we see; ethical labor consists of continuously 'unselfing' to perceive the independent reality of others.